maps in the twentieth century

the beginning of a space age, with the first launching of a satellite and with the landing on the Moon.

the emergence of two superpowers: US and USSR (with the former to stay as such until now).

the technological revolution with the rapid development of the new means to distribute information: radio, TV and computers.

All these events not only changed the face of our planet, but they also changed the scale of cartography. The fact that the major conflagrations have got the status of “world wars” is in itself revealing of the changing cartography. If at the beginning of the century, there still were large blank spots on world maps, (especially Africa, Australia and Arctic region) then at the end of the century there were only minor unmapped territories. From artifacts of colonization maps became markers of decolonization. It was often the case that the same maps, which were used by empires to colonize a territory, were used by former colonies to mark their own identity and national territory.

As an illustration of how world wars changed the American cartographic thinking, I would mention Susan Schulten’s article on Richard Edes Harrison’s maps. In fact Harrison reacted to the challenges of World War II and argued that US should be involved in this war a couple of months ahead of Pearl Harbor. The popularity of his maps cannot be explained only by their originality. It is the merit of the twentieth century to provide a favorable technological context, in which visual material could be distributed widely. Even if these maps were not televised and only printed, the wide development of TV provided a favorable framework for the special status of the visuals.

Another war of the twentieth century, Cold War had rather hot consequences in the field of cartography. The development of satellite imagery provided a framework for the reinterpretation of earth’s topography. The surface of the planet ceased to be only a sum of longitudes and latitudes. Then, it became possible to assemble Geographic Information Systems.

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4 Responses

I know that it has been brought up on the blogs before, so I’m not being very original, but your post made me think of Buster’s cartographic experience on Arrested Development (“Hasn’t everything sorta been discovered though, by like Magellan, Cortés, NASA?”…”Those guys did okay I guess”) What brought this back up for me was the fact that before this week’s reading I had never thought about NASA and space exploration as being a part of cartography. It makes complete sense both because satellites looking down at the earth clearly provide new, detailed information about the earth itself, and space being largely unknown in the modern era would mean that a first step to discovery would be mapping. I had taken advantage of this kind of cartography and the resources it provides for me. It is just one more way that the Cold War shaped our modern world.

I wonder, reading your post, how much of the change in perspective experienced by many people in the middle of the 20th century visible only through the development of flight contributed to the popularity of the Harrison maps. In a way, they are birds-eye maps writ large.

The other thought that occurs to me, reading your post, is how the improvement in computing has enabled us to process information in order to produces the GIS tools you mention in your last paragraph. At some point, we are going to run into a limit, if only the rate at which humans can process the information that a map is presenting. Increasingly, I think, the art of making a map is not going to be what information to include, but choosing what to exclude from available information in order to clarify the remainder.